The 45-Minute Scrum

During any meeting, most people get fidgety at about the nine-minute mark. By the time the team hits the 15-minute time box for the daily scrum, they’re ready to put the new plan into action. And this happens during well-executed daily scrum. If a daily scrum hits a whopping 45 minutes, your team has definitely checked out and is no longer paying attention. (It’s a miracle if they’re still awake.)

Some people think that if they just keep talking, they’ll sound like they’re giving an informed answer. These kind of rambling answers are a common cause of daily scrums lasting longer than the 15-minute limit. If your daily scrum is feeling like a daily bore, start listening a little harder. You’ll often hear generic answers, overly technical answers, vague hand-waving about work getting done “soon,” and other unprepared answers. You may also see the daily scrum get hijacked by people who are trying to solve problems, refine product backlog items, gather status reports from the Scrum team, perform a monolog, or are simply procrastinating. None of those activities should to be part of the daily scrum. The point is to quickly create a plan for making progress over the next 24 hours—that’s it.

The time box for the daily scrum is 15 minutes. If your development team is taking longer than that to conduct the event, they have a serious focus problem.

So how do you go about fixing this? The first question to consider is: What’s the hold up? Are there too many team members? Are teams trying to solve development issues during the daily scrum? Is the product owner using this time to provide details on product backlog items? Wait…why is the product owner participating in the daily scrum?

Once you have a handle on where the time is going, you can start to make some corrections. We’ve already discussed using a physical team board. This technique alone can bring focus back to your daily scrum.

If the team is going off on tangents or trying to solve problems, try using a parking lot: a list of things to possibly discuss after the daily scrum. Members of the development team can then decide how to clear the items off the parking lot (self-organization) and move on with their day.

If you don’t have the sprint goal at the top of your team board already, now is a great time to post it up there. Any time the team goes off on a tangent, team members can point to the sprint goal as a reminder to stay on track. A great question to ask when the team goes off on a tangent during the daily scrum is, “How does this conversation contribute to our plan to make progress toward the sprint goal?”

Pointing to the sprint goal is a powerful gesture that can help restore focus to your daily scrum and turn these long bore-fests into valuable and productive planning sessions—that last 15 minutes or less.